The following instructions apply specifically to Host Gator, but should be close enough for anyplace that offers cpanel access.

Step 1 : Log into your cpanel account

When you registered with your hosting provider, you should have received information on how to go about logging into and managing your account.

Use the information in your initial greeting email to log into your account now.

Step 2 : On the right side, find the "Mail" section and select "Email Accounts"

Step 3 : Create the email account

• Enter the name of the account you wish to create
• Enter a password for it
• Enter the password again
• Set the maximum size of the mailbox in the Mailbox quota box.
  I would recommend 10 MB or less for the mailbox quota unless you like to leave all of your mail on the server.

As you can see below, there is a video tutorial available as well.

Once you select "Create", you will see your new mail account listed at the bottom of the screen.

From there, you can do one of the following:

• Check your email online with cpanel
• Setup your new email account in Mozilla Thunderbird
• Setup your new email account in a different mail client.

The instructions here assume that you are using Mozilla Thunderbird as your mail client, but the process should be somewhat the same for other mail clients.

Step 1 : Open Your Mail Client

Open the mail client that you wish to use for your new email account.

Step 2 : Add your new email accounts informaiton

1. Select "Tools" from the file menu
2. Select "Account Settings…" from the drop down menu

That should open the "Account Settings" window.

From there, select "Add Account…" to bring up the Account Wizard.

Make sure that "Email Account" is specified and select "Next" to reach the "Identity" screen.

Enter the name you want displayed when you send mail as well as the email address you wish to setup…which should be one of the ones you just created and then select "Next;" to reach the "Server Information" screen.

• Make sure that POP is selected
• Enter the incoming server
  This should look like mail.yourdomainname. For example, if your domain is brinsantiquebooks.com, this should read mail.brinsantiquebooks.com
• Uncheck the "Use Global Inbox" unless you want mail sent to this address mixed in with mail from your other email accounts.
• Select Next to reach the "User Names" screen

For "Incoming User Name" enter your account name. This should look like your email address, but have a + instead of an @. e.g. for johndoe@somewhere.com the account name should be johndoe+somewhere.com. Once finished, select "Next" to reach the Account Name screen.

In the "Account Name" box, enter the name you want to have displayed in the left window in reference to this account. The default is fine, but you might want it to be something like YourSite-Admin or some such. When finished, select next to reach the "Congratulations!" screen.

Select finish and the mailbox will be setup.

Step 3 : Setup your outgoing mail server information

You can now receive mail on the account, but you will need to be able to send mail as well, so it is time to setup your outgoing mail server information.

In the "Account Settings" screen, find “Outgoing Server (SMTP)” in the left box. You may need to scroll down to see it. This will bring up the Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings dialog box.

Select “Add…” to bring up the SMTP Server dialog box.

In that box:

• Enter a description
• Enter the server name to be used.
  This should be mail.yourdomain (e.g. mail.whatever.com)
• Make sure "Use name and password" is checked.
• Under "Use secure connection" select "TLS, if available"
• Once finished, select "OK"

Step 4 : Set your email account to use the right outgoing server

All that remains is to set the account you just setup to use the outgoing server that you setup.

• In Account Settings, select your new account on the left.
• You should see a drop down displayed on the right labeled "Outgoing Server (SMTP):
• Choose the Outgoing server you just created
• Select OK

You should now be able to send and receive mail via Mozilla Thunderbird.

If you need detailed instructions for a different client, do a search for the name of your email client and the words “add account” or “how add email account” and you should find relevant results. Alternately, check your email clients documentation.

Step 1 : Log into CPanel

Using the information you received when you setup your account, log into cpanel.

Step 2 : Select Webmail

Once logged in, locate the email section and select "Webmail"

Note the instructions provided there on how to go about logging into email accounts via webmail then select the provided link to continue.

Step 3 : Choose a mail client

Select the email reader you wish to use. For this example, we will use Horde, so select the Horde icon then choose your language and select "Log in" .

Step 4 : View your mail or create new messages

Once you log in, you will be taken to a screen like the following:

Select "inbox" to view mail you have received or "New Message" to create a new message.

Typically, you can easily get a domain name for under $15.00 per year. However, if money is tight or you simply prefer to get the best deal possible, with a little research you can find domain names for well under $10.00 per year.

Cheap Domain Names from GoDaddy

While I have not had good experiences with Godaddy for hosting in the past ( I have heard that they have improved a lot, but haven’t tried them again ), I have never had complaints with registering domains through them…and they offer very competitive pricing where domains are concerned.

Host Gator, which I recommend for hosting, charges $15.00 per year for domains…so you can likely save yourself $6-$8 by hunting around for someone else to get a domain from.

Doing a search for “Godaddy promo codes” in google should turn up a few results. Simply look them over and see what you can find. Quite often, you can find codes to register new domains with godaddy for as little as $7.00.

From there, go to Godaddy.com, enter the domain name you are interested in, see if it is available, and register it.

If you go this route, and get hosting through Host Gator, you will need to be sure to log into godaddy and set your name servers properly once you have purchased hosting. Doing so involves selecting your registered domain, locating the dns settings, and updating them to those provided to you in your Host Gator welcome email.

How most people choose their domain name poorly

A lot of people go with the name of their store, which doesn’t work so well unless your store has excellent name recognition or a name which contains the keywords that people are looking for.

By way of example, if you sell antique books and your store name is Brins Treasures, unless you have the name recognition of coca cola, walmart, etc., having your primary domain named www.brinstreasures.com is not the best way to go.

A better way to choose your domain name

Instead, your main domain name should have something to do with the words that people actually search on. Rather than guessing and choosing something like www.brinsantiquebooks.com, you should spend the little bit of extra time, effort, and energy required to make sure you pick the strongest domain name possible.

If you have not done so, and are unfamiliar with keyword research in general, be sure to read "Basic Keyword Research for Targeted marketing before continuing.

For this example, you might go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter “antique book” as your initial phrase, which would give you results on searches related to antique books as well as additional keywords to consider, among which you would find “used books”, “collectible books”, “old books”, and “rare books”.

Adding those phrases to your search and re-running it, you would get something akin to the following:

Looking over the global monthly search volume, we find that used books, collectible books, old books, rare books, and antiquarian collectible books all have more people searching for them than antique books…so better choices for a domain name might be

• brinsusedbooks.com
• brinscollectiblebooks.com
• brinsoldbooks.com
• brinsrarebooks.com
• brinsantiquariancollectiblebooks.com

Checking the competition

Of course, before making a final decision on your domain name, you should also take a look at your competition

To do so, pop each keyword into google and search on it. Make sure to enclose each phrase in quotes so that only potentially relevant pages show up.

Used books shows some pretty stiff competition with 38.8 million results and having abebooks, alibris, barnsandnoble, and half show up in the top four spots…in addition to three paid ads above the results.

Collectible books is a bit more accessable, with only 4.2 million results and no paid advertisements…but it still has powells, abebooks, cdickens, and biblio in the top four spots.

Old books looks even better, with 3.5 million results, one paid advertisement at the top of the results and rbms and alibris being the top competition.

Rare books also has some stiff competition, with 10 million results, no paid advertisements on top of the search results, and abebooks, alibris, and amazon coming in as your top competitors.

Personally, I would try to go with a smaller niche if I wanted to compete in such markets, but if I had to use a broad selection I would choose collectiblebooks or oldbooks as part of my domain name. Both get good search volume and the natural search results competition is not nearly as tough as it is for either used books or rare books.

Branding Considerations

If you really want your store name as a domain, register one domain as shown above via keyword research and a second domain with your store name.

Then, use the keyword domain for setting up your site and park your branding domain on top of it. For this example, perhaps you pick two domain names:

• BrinsTreasures.com
• BrinsCollectibleBooks.com

Setup your site on BrinsCollectibleBooks.com and then park BrinsTreasures.com on top of it so that both domain names point to the same site.

For search ranking purposes, you would then focus on your researched domain name, trying to get links to your site named "Collectible Books" or "Brins Collectible Books".

While getting people to your site is nice, your focus should be on bringing people who are looking to buy the types of items you offer to your website.

There are literally thousands of articles available on different aspects of keyword research and everyone seems to have their own favorite methods…some completely free and some involving expensive monthly subscriptions. This article will cover the basics of doing your own keyword research with simple, freely available tools.

Basic Words for Researching

When starting your keyword research, you first need to know what you are wanting to do and decide upon a few initial keywords to look into.

For example, if you have a store specializing in childrens toys, you might start out using just the word toys. Alternatively, you might start with more specific terms such as “kids toys” and “childrens toys”.

Finding high search volume terms

Once you have a couple of words to look into, you need to find out what people are searching for in relation to those words.

To start with, I recommend using the Google External Keyword Tool.

The Google External Keyword Tool

To start:

• Enter your initial search terms, one per line, into the "Enter one keyword or phrase per line:" box
• Leave the "Use synonyms" box checked
• Enter the displayed characters into the box below them.
• Leave "Filter my results" alone for now
• Select "Get keyword ideas"

You should then see results listed below the entry box similar to those below:

As you can see, you get a variety of results back showing the number of searches done locally for the current month as well as the global monthly search volume for each word or phrase listed on the left.

At the top, click “Global Monthly Search Volume” to order the results by volume.

The words and phrases listed at the top are those which most people search for. As you can see, for these phrases most people search for “kids toys”, though there are plenty of people searching for a variety of other words as well.

Depending on the type of keyword research you are doing, you may or may not be worried about competition for particular terms. Fortunately, a quick easy way to determine competition is to take any particular term and put it into a search engine in quotes.

There are a few things of note in the above image:

• In the red box, you see three sites paying to have their listings above all of the normal search results. That denotes that there is some serious paid competition out there for the term Kids toys
• In the purple box, you will see that there are 3.8 million sites competing on the phrase “kids toys” for search engine ranking. Normally you will want that number to be as low as possible…and 3.8 million results denotes that your keyword is probably too generic to compete effectively.
• In the yellow box, you will see sites that are paying to have advertisements displayed for the term “kids toys”. These you don’t need to worry about unless you plan to do paid advertising yourself.
• In the green box is your primary competition. Specifically, the results on the first page are your primary competition. Ideally, you will want to end up as the first result if at all possible.

Checking the competition

Once you have limited your term down to something with a smaller result of competing sites ( the purple box ), you should then visit at least the first three sites being displayed and see what google thinks of them in terms of page rank ( 0 being the lowest, 10 being the highest ).

For this, I recommend using mozilla firefox and getting the google toolbar plugin for it as the plugin can be set to display page rank of any site you visit and quickly let you see how many backlinks a site has as well as what they are.

As you can see, if you were to try and compete on “Kids Toys”, your primary competitor would be Toys R Us…and google gives them a page rank of 7…so you would have your work cut out for you.

If you selected “Backward links”, you would find that there are over 1000 links to Toys R Us from various sites. While you cannot tell if they are quality links or not, a thousand links can be a bit hard to overcome.

If you selected “Similar Pages”, you would find sites which google considers similar to the Toys R Us site, of which it lists 28.

Personally, I would fine tune my search phrase to try and have weaker competition in terms of search ranking. Perhaps you are selling educational toys…doing a search for that term (in quotes) returns only 21,600 competing sites, one paid advertiser at the top of the results, and the highest ranked site has a page rank of 2 and only two backward links. Of course, that phrase only has 6,600 monthly search results…but taking the number one spot (which typically gets over 50% of all clicks by users) would be trivial.

Google Trends From Wordtracker

Another handy tool for keyword research is google trends from Wordtracker. While the results aren’t terribly up to date on their free tool, you can find a variety of different phrases…and by selecting the three bars in the "G" column, you can see how much competition there is on a particular term as well as the number of visitors per day for that term.

This information can give you a rough idea of how tough the competition is, though I prefer using the google toolbar as above.

Google Insights for Search

Another nice tool, especially when you have a few different keywords you want to compare, is Google Insights for Search.

Just place your terms in the "Search terms" box at the top, specify the region and dates you are interested in, and select search.

As you can see, you will get regional interest, a list of search terms ( related to the specified phrase…change this with the dropdown ), and a list of searches that are increasing in volume.

Here you will see that “toys for kids” looks to have the highest number of results for “kids toys”, but a ton of people search for store names in relation to kids toys. When you see that kind of brand recognition, it is typically best to find a different search phrase.

Final words…

While volumes of information exists on keyword research, for increasing traffic to your website without paid advertising, the most important things to consider when doing keyword research are the demand for your possible keyword and the quality of the sites which come up in the top few results. You can certainly choose to go up against stiff competition, but you will get results a lot faster if you start out by focusing on getting your site to show as the top result for less competitive terms.